Rich Tit Bits

I am reading a wonderful book at present.  Entitled, “the best American magazine writing” 2011 it contains wonderful gems worth digesting indeed.  Michael Hasting’s piece “The runaway General” frightened me only because I’d already read the impressive piece before and was for a moment horrified that the book would turn out to be all too familiar.  But no, the rest were new to me and delightful in their range of topics and insights.  Jane Mayers wrote ‘Covert Operations’ and dealt with two wealthy brothers who have fought a furious war against climate change science and helped to seed the tea party movement.  They criticize political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffectual and unnecessary.  The fact that their own company was named one of the top ten air polluters in the US might have had something to do with that.  In 1997 when the Environmental Protection Agency acted to reduce surface ozone, caused in part by emission from oil refineries, one of industry’s arguments put forward against this reduction was that smog free skies would result in more skin cancer!  Unbelievably, this argument was accepted by the Court.  You, really have to just shake your head in bewilderment at times!  Such is the funding strength of the two industrialists mentioned in the article that they even manage to colour the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History exhibits.  In a multimedia exploration of mankind and climate change, the human element in influencing such climate change is carefully whitewashed out.  Obviously, linking increases in carbon dioxide to fossil fuels would not hit the right note for these particular funders. 

It reminds me all too painfully of the new Giants Causeway Centre in Northern Ireland where the creationist belief finds its place in the display.  Please, let us be real!  In educational establishments that play, one hopes, a role in shaping young minds of the future can we try to avoid fantasy land, fake science or the polluter’s agendas.  The Giant’s Causeway was created by volcanic eruptions 60 million years ago, not by mystical giants laying down a bridge to Scotland and clearly neither is it consistent with the creationist’s claim that the earth is a mere 6000 years old.  The fact that increasingly educational programmes pussy foot around the truth to humour the rich or the religious is a worrisome sign.

This book challenges many other taboos including how we treat the dying in our medical system.  A must read article by Atul Gawande entitled ‘Letting Go’.  Scott Horton’s article on the three suicides in Guantanamo on June 9, 2006 is troubling.  It does seem highly suspect, as is claimed by American authorities, that the three could managed to have hung themselves, hands bound with rags down their throats.  I am only halfway through this book but it is toe curlingly good.  Well written, thoughtfully researched it feels like a long cool drink in the desert, refreshing, unexpected and rejuvenating.